Identification of C. elegans Strains Using a Fully Convolutional Neural Network on Behavioural Dynamics

Avelino Javer, André E. X. Brown, Iasonas Kokkinos, Jens Rittscher

Abstract: The nematode C. elegans is a promising model organism to understand the genetic basis of behaviour due to its anatomical simplicity. In this work, we present a deep learning model capable of discerning genetically diverse strains based only on their recorded spontaneous activity, and explore how its performance changes as different embeddings are used as input. The model outperforms hand-crafted features on strain classification when trained directly on time series of worm postures.